You’d think growing up aro/ace would make someone immune to the “you must strive to be sexy and beautiful” pressure of society. But I think it can actually make it worse because, lacking your own internal frame of reference, you just get left absorbing the cultural signals that the minimum bar for attractive is a 10/10 bombshell 23-year-old skinny white Hollywood actress with significant makeup and some plastic surgery.
Like it takes longer to gather the life experience to recognize average-looking and even “ugly” people are attractive and desirable to a significant portion of the population.
Like “entity with no need for food or hunger” getting exposed to extremely polished high-production-value food advertisements and high-profile foodie content with millions of views would go “oh okay, that explains what food is appealing” and miss the fact that many many many people just want a hotdog right now.